[Monday Motivator] Hedge Your Bets

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.

Last week's Monday Motivator ("Get Out There and Shake It!") definitely pressed some people’s "personal responsibility" buttons! I heard lots of immediate reactivity, but I also heard from people who decided to take new steps forward by setting up lunch dates, asking someone to read a manuscript, focusing their regular conversation with a colleague on research (instead of departmental gossip, and one person simply decided to approach her cranky colleague in a whole new spirit. Bravo!

The fact of the matter is that most departments aren’t set up to support your success and yet, YOU HAVE TO SUCCEED ANYWAY! So, congratulations to all of you who acknowledged that as your reality and stepped out in a new way last week. And since I'm on the general topic of "Shaking It," let's move on to the next common mistake new faculty members make: Putting All Your Eggs in One Institutional Basket.

I realize that it's incredibly difficult to get a tenure-track job these days, and some of us were in graduate school for so long that we feel extraordinarily grateful to our institutions for simply employing us. In addition, many of us were trained under faculty mentors who spent their entire careers at ONE institution and taught us this was "the way things are" in academic life. Regrettably, the result is that some new faculty members behave as if their very life depends on that tenure decision! They bend over backwards to please everyone at their institution, invest large amounts of time in long term institutional projects, and accept poor treatment from their senior colleagues out of a desperate hope that they will be deemed worthy and allowed to stay. In other words, their identity and self-worth are so wholly dependent on winning tenure at their current institution that failing to do so would be utterly unbearable.

The problem with this approach is two-fold. First and foremost, you don't know whether your current institution is going to make a long-term commitment to you (via tenure and promotion), so why invest 100% of your emotional energy, identity, and self in that outcome? More importantly, this desperate stance puts you in a powerless position because you are, in effect, handing all the power over your future to your employer (instead of assuming some control over it yourself).

How your senior colleagues will vote on your tenure case is out of your control, but there are several important factors that are fully under your control: 1) your research productivity, 2) your emotional investment in your current institution, and 3) promoting your work beyond your institution. Below I outline just a few concrete ways that you can protect yourself from the possibility of future loss, by identifying your power today and using it to invest in yourself first.
Cultivate A Professional Attitude

One of the best ways that you can hedge your bets is to shift your reference group from the faculty at your institution to the broader national arena of your discipline. By understanding yourself as "a scholar who currently works at ______ college/university," you will begin to understand the necessity of not only "shaking it" with your departmental colleagues, but also extending your network to get out there and shake it with the other scholars in your discipline. By proactively extending your network and maximizing your research productivity, you increase the possibility that you will be marketable in your later tenure-track years and then have the ability to decide whether or not you want to stay at your institution (as opposed to whether or not others will allow you to stay).


Make A Top 10 List

The best advice I received as a new faculty member was to make a list of the top 10 people in my research area and then make it my business to connect with them during my five years on the tenure track. Developing your Top 10 list is critical for two reasons: 1) this is the most likely pool of scholars from which your external review letters will be requested when you come up for tenure review; and 2) these are the scholars that your work is in conversation with (a conversation that can't happen if they are unaware of your published work). Even if you are at a college where teaching and research are equally valued, your institution will still solicit external reviews of your scholarship, and they are likely to be drawn from the pool of well-known researchers in your area.


Extend Yourself

Once you have identified your Top 10, figure out how to connect with these individuals. You could invite them to give a talk at your institution, approach them at conferences, send them your recently published article with a personal note, etc. Some will be pleasant and approachable, and others will completely ignore you. What's important is that you begin proactively connecting with people in your discipline who matter to your future success -- as a candidate for tenure and as a scholar. Additionally, feel free to do whatever you think will help introduce other scholars in your field to your work, such as giving talks at your friend's institutions and other local colleges, giving great presentations at conferences, and letting other people know when you have published something they might find useful. The point is to let as many people know about your research as possible while making targeted efforts with those who are likely to be asked to write your external reviews.


If You Are Unhappy, Go On The Market

Nothing puts your current situation in perspective like dipping a toe in the water! If you have published prolifically in the first few years of your current tenure-track job, then you are a far more attractive job candidate than you were ABD, and you are likely to generate more interest than in your previous job search. Sometimes visiting another campus makes you value your current institution in a whole new way, and other times it can make you wonder why on earth you have worked there for so long. Either way, it can be a valuable experience to help you make the mental shift from institutional dependency to independence as a scholar.


Write Every Day

I should have started with this item because everything else I've said is predicated upon your ability to publish your research. Publications are the currency in the academic market so maintaining research productivity will fulfill you as a scholar, increase your marketability, give you some measure of power over your own future, and provide you with the opportunity to make choices. In short, be sure you are writing every day and doing what you need to do to publish your research.

The Weekly Challenge

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes.
• Write your Top 10 list (if you don't have one already).
• Consider ways you could connect with the people on your Top 10 list.
• Consider what it would mean to think of yourself FIRST as a scholar, and SECOND as a "junior" faculty member at your particular institution.
• If you feel reactive to imagining yourself beyond your institutional walls, gently and patiently ask yourself WHY?
• If you find yourself feeling "disloyal” by this type of thinking, remind yourself that your institution will quickly and easily cut you loose if you are denied tenure. Then consider how you could adjust your emotional investment in your institution to MATCH its investment in you.

Life on the tenure track can frequently leave new faculty feeling powerless, vulnerable, and at the mercy of subjective criteria for evaluation. I hope that this week brings you the clarity to claim what power you have in your academic career, the imagination to see beyond your immediate context, and the peace that comes from knowing your future is in your hands.

Microsoft Word Table of Content Edits

I'm in my final edits for Dissertation corrections, and large part of errors are coming from formatting issues in the Table of Content. Here's few methods I find useful while working on my edits. I'm using Office 2013, so the required menu items might be different from your version. 

How to change the Upper Case Roman Numerals to Lower Case?

This is due to your Table of Content (TOC) level 1 font is in All Caps. Press Ctrl + Shift + S to open the Apply Style dialog and select TOC1 and press modify. Go to format dropdown list in the bottom and Font, remove the check mark on the All Caps. This will change your Upper Case Roman Numerals in the TOC to lower case. If it is different, then check your actual page numbers whether they are in lower case.

[Acrobat SDK Plug-in Development] How to extract text from Acrobat Text Highlight Tool?

This is an update to my previous post on Acrobat SDK Plug-in Development: How to create Text Highlight. In this new code, I'll explain far easier way to manipulate Adobe Acrobat Text Highlight tool to get the text from the highlighted area and then use it in your plugin.

This code snippet will explain how to extract text highlighted using the Text Highlight tool plug-in using Acrobat SDK. I assume that you've already know how to implement basic plug-in functionality using Acrobat SDK. The version of the SDK used in this code example is Acrobat XI SDK. I also assume following requirements,

• Read PDF 32000-1:2008 12.5.6.10, “Text Markup Annotations”, for further information
  wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
• You can use PDWordFinderAcquireWordList() method to get the total word list and then use a loop to create the CosObj Dic. Read my previous post about how to extract terms from PDF and create COS Dictionary. 

Step 1: If you start with the BasicPlugin.cpp in the Acrobat SDK then you should have the following function when you click on your plugin from the menu bar,

ACCB1 void ACCB2 MyPluginCommand(void *clientData)

{

// get this plugin's name for display

ASAtom NameAtom = ASExtensionGetRegisteredName (gExtensionID);

const char * name = ASAtomGetString(NameAtom);

char str[256];

sprintf(str,"This menu item is added by plugin %s.\n", name);

// try to get front PDF document 

AVDoc avDoc = AVAppGetActiveDoc();

//Display words of the pdf file. 

PDDoc currentPDDoc =AVDocGetPDDoc(avDoc);

AVPageView currentPageView = AVDocGetPageView (avDoc);

ASInt32 pageNum = AVPageViewGetPageNum(currentPageView);

//Create a PDWordFinderConfigRec object;

PDWordFinderConfigRec pConfig;

//Set the DWordFinderConfigRec object's attributes

memset(&pConfig, 0, sizeof(PDWordFinderConfigRec));

pConfig.recSize = sizeof(PDWordFinderConfigRec);

pConfig.ignoreCharGaps = true;

pConfig.ignoreLineGaps = true;

pConfig.noAnnots = true;

pConfig.noEncodingGuess = true;

//Create a PDWordFinder object

PDWordFinder pdWordFinder = PDDocCreateWordFinderEx(currentPDDoc, WF_LATEST_VERSION, false, &pConfig);

//Create a callback function

PDWordProc wordProc = NULL;

wordProc= ASCallbackCreateProto(PDWordProc, &getHighlightedText);

//Extract and display words highlighted 

PDWordFinderEnumWords(pdWordFinder, pageNum, wordProc, NULL);

PDWordFinderDestroy(pdWordFinder);

string strs = pdfCorpus.str();

const char* ps = strs.c_str();

AVAlertNote(ps);

if(avDoc==NULL) {

// if no doc is loaded, make a message.

strcat(str,"There is no PDF document loaded in Acrobat.");

}

else {

// if a PDF is open, get its number of pages

PDDoc pdDoc = AVDocGetPDDoc (avDoc);

int numPages = PDDocGetNumPages (pdDoc);

sprintf(str,"%sThe active PDF document has %d pages.", str, numPages);

}

}

Step 2: Now use the getHighlightText method to go through all the annotations and get PDTextSelect object. 

ACCB1 ASBool ACCB2 getHighlightedText(PDWordFinder wObj, PDWord wInfo, ASInt32 pgNum, void *clientData)

{

char stringBuffer[100];

AVDoc avDoc = AVAppGetActiveDoc();

PDDoc currentPDDoc =AVDocGetPDDoc(avDoc);

CosDoc cd = PDDocGetCosDoc(currentPDDoc);

PDAnnot annot;

PDPage pdpage = PDDocAcquirePage(currentPDDoc, pgNum);

ASInt32 numAnnots =PDPageGetNumAnnots(pdpage);

ASFixedRect boundingRect; // bounding rectangle of the term

char * annBuf;

for(ASInt32 i = 0; i< numAnnots; i++){

annot = PDPageGetAnnot(pdpage, i);

if (ASAtomFromString("Highlight") == PDAnnotGetSubtype(annot))

{

// Gets the annotation's rect

PDAnnotGetRect(annot, &boundingRect);

// Gets the text selection from the annotation's rect

PDTextSelect textSelect = PDDocCreateTextSelect(currentPDDoc, pgNum, &boundingRect);

                        // create a callback to get the text from highlighted bounding box

PDTextSelectEnumText( textSelect , ASCallbackCreateProto(PDTextSelectEnumTextProc,&pdTextSelectEnumTextProc) , &annBuf );

}

}

return 0;

}

Step 3: Create a callback function to extract the text from the PDTextSelect object. Here, pdfCorpus is a stringstream so I can use that in another part of the code. 

ACCB1 ASBool ACCB2 pdTextSelectEnumTextProc(void* procObj, PDFont font, ASFixed size, PDColorValue color, char* text,ASInt32 textLen)
{
char stringBuffer[200];
strcpy(stringBuffer,text);
pdfCorpus << stringBuffer;
return true ;
}

 

Have You Fallen Into The Teaching Trap? (Monday Motivator for Faculty for the Future Monday, March 9, 2015 )

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

My first tenure-track job was extraordinarily teaching intensive. I taught five courses per semester at a community college while also writing my dissertation. As difficult as that situation was for me, I was delighted to have a job devoted to teaching because at the very core of my being, I AM a teacher. As someone who loves teaching, I threw my heart and soul into every class. And, as you can imagine, I quickly burned out! As I moved to different jobs (first at a liberal arts college and then a research-intensive university), you might expect that the time I spent on teaching decreased as my research expectations increased. But that wasn’t the case -- even when teaching two courses per semester I still spent the same amount of time as when I was teaching five!

I’m remembering what it felt like to spend so much time on teaching because I’ve been inundated the past two weeks by new faculty who are frustrated about how much time, energy and effort they are spending on teaching and service and how little is "left over" for research and writing. Given the consistent feelings of exhaustion and discouragement expressed, I think it's time for some honest discussion about Common New Faculty Mistake #9: Falling Into the Teaching Trap.

Teaching can be a wonderfully fulfilling, intellectually stimulating, and enjoyable activity, so let me be clear what I mean by "the teaching trap." The trap is when new tenure-track faculty spend the vast majority of their time on teaching at the expense of their research and writing and then find that their limited research productivity endangers their ability to be promoted at their current institution, or move to another one. And if you are at an institution where your advancement will be based largely (or entirely) on teaching, the "teaching trap” occurs when you fail to manage your boundaries around teaching so that you have no time or energy for the other things that matter in your work and in your life. If you find yourself coming to campus early and staying late, if you’re spending every weekend grading and preparing for the next week’s classes, if you're answering student's text messages into the wee hours of the night, if you’re sacrificing sleep and/or pulling all-nighters in order to get ready for the next day’s class meeting, and – as a result -- you haven’t spent any time moving your research agenda forward or investing in your long-term success, then you may have fallen into the teaching trap.

Time for Some Tough Questions
While it’s important to recognize when you have fallen into the teaching trap, it’s even more critical to identify WHY you are spending such disproportionately large amounts of time on teaching. The first place to start climbing out of the trap is by asking yourself: why am I over-preparing and over-functioning in this one aspect of my job?

There are MANY different possible reasons including:
You love teaching (you find course prep and classroom interaction more stimulating than research).
You mistakenly equate "great teaching" with delivering enormous amounts of content in each class period.
You feel insecure about your job performance.
You are highly sensitive to students' evaluations of your teaching.
You believe it’s somehow possible to please everyone so if you just spend more time, you will teach better and receive unanimously positive evaluations.
You feel you have to be twice as good to be judged as equal.
You have unrealistically high expectations about teaching.
You often feel like a fraud or impostor, so over-preparing for your classes protects you from being discovered.
You have a profound fear of failure in the areas of research and publication (teaching becomes a form of procrastination from writing).
You have never thought about how you're spending your time and have unconsciously fallen into the teaching trap because of the built-in accountability that standing in front of a classroom full of students several times a week provides.
Your professors were poor teachers when you were in college and you’re trying to be different and better for your students (i.e., the professor you never had).
If you’re an underrepresented faculty member, the dynamics of racism and sexism in the classroom mean that you don’t get the benefit of the doubt from students, so you over-prepare in order to prove you deserve to be teaching in a college classroom.


Once you have pinpointed WHY you are over-preparing, you can begin to think about ways to teach effectively and efficiently. Here are a few ideas:

Write Every Day
If you're spending too much time on teaching and haven't set aside time for your writing, then consider rearranging your daily schedule so that you write for at least 30 minutes every day, first thing in the morning (before checking email). Instead of preparing for class and "hoping” you have time to write, flip that upside down so that you write first and hope to have time to complete all of your course prep.

Try a Mid-Term Course Correction
I've previously suggested giving a mid-term evaluation to your students by asking three simple questions: 1) What do you like best about this class? 2) What do you like least about this class? and 3) What suggestions do you have for the rest of the semester? Listen closely to what your students are saying, take some of their suggestions, and let them know you are doing so. This is a wonderful opportunity to right-size the reading and writing assignments left in the term and give yourself the chance to re-orient your time and energy toward your research.

Take the Long View of Your Career
If you're like me and spend too much time on teaching because you LOVE teaching and LOVE your students, try to think of your career as a book with many chapters. If research is a significant component of your tenure review, then the pre-tenure chapter must focus on research and writing in order for there to be subsequent chapters. You can invest in becoming a master teacher in one of the post-tenure chapters of your career. But for now, you must figure out a way to teach that doesn’t preclude publication.

Align Your Teaching Standards With Your Department
If you are a perfectionist and have very high standards for your classroom, consider visiting some of your colleague's classrooms. This can be a tremendously liberating experience and help you to put what goes on in your own classroom into alignment with your local context. Now if your colleagues are apathetic or mediocre in the classroom, I’m not suggesting you become apathetic or mediocre. But if, for example, you are assigning twice as many essays as your colleagues (which then requires you to spend twice as much time grading), there may be room for adjustments.

Hire a Grader
If you have the funds, hire someone to assist you with grading. Having a grader forces you toconstruct grading rubrics for assignments, which is both an excellent teaching practice and a time-saving technique.

Ask Your Local Faculty Developer For Help
Many campuses have a Center for Teaching Excellence that is staffed with faculty development experts. These folks would love nothing more than to help you improve your teaching! Not only do they want to help you, they know all the empirically documented best practices. Find these people on your campus and ask them how you can become a more effective and efficient teacher.

Delete RateMyProfessors.com from Your Bookmarks (and Your Consciousness)
If your over-preparation is an effort to make everyone happy, if you are driven by a fear of negative evaluation, if you find yourself devastated by what a few angry students wrote about you on RateMyProfessors.com, and/or you consistently focus on the small number of negative reviews (to the exclusion of the overwhelmingly positive majority), it’s time to re-orient your perspective. First and foremost, stop checking this website: it’s neither representative nor helpful. Instead, use that time to ask yourself: does it make sense to focus on the broad pattern of comments in my formal student evaluations or the outlying data points as reliable feedback for my teaching? If the broad pattern is negative, it’s time to visit your local faculty developer. If the broad pattern is positive, release yourself from the idea that it’s even possible to please everyone. It that doesn’t work, try asking some of your senior colleagues (whose teaching you admire) to share their evaluations with you and provide some perspective on yours. This will open your eyes to the fact that even award-winning master-teachers receive a few negative evaluations each term. The difference is that they have learned to focus on the big picture and work towards continual and incremental improvement each semester instead of dwelling on a handful of negative comments.

Consider Working on Your Core Issues
If you find that the reasons underlying your over-functioning are deep and profound feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, anxiety, and fear, then why not consider taking one hour out of your week to unravel those issues with a therapist. Psychological obstacles tend to persistently re-emerge across various areas of our lives and relationships so why not pro-actively start the process of self-reflection and growth now?

Create Accountability for Your Research and Writing
If you spend too much time on teaching because it has a built-in accountability mechanism (you have to stand in front of class several times a week), then create an equally powerful accountability mechanism for your research and writing. You can join the monthly writing challenges on the NCFDD discussion forum, you can connect with a writing buddy, you can join a write-on-site group, or you could start a writing group of new faculty who hold each other accountable for meeting their weekly writing goals. I've done all of these at different times of my career to create accountability for my writing that rivals a classroom full of students for my teaching, and each one has been effective in keeping me on track.

I'm NOT suggesting you should run out and do ALL of these things today. Instead, I'm presenting this list of ideas to stimulate your thinking about how many different options you have available to help you escape the teaching trap.

The Weekly Challenge
This week I challenge you to:

• Evaluate whether your time spent on teaching is in line with your tenure criteria.
• If not, gently ask yourself: WHY AM I SPENDING SO MUCH TIME ON MY TEACHING?
• Once you know the answer, develop one concrete step forward you can take this week to align the distribution of your time and energy towards the activities that matter most to your tenure and promotion.
• Write every day for at least 30 minutes (just try it!).

I hope this week brings each of you the honesty to assess whether or not you have fallen into The Teaching Trap, the strength to ask yourself WHY, and the joy of consciously making changes that will allow you to move in a new direction!

Time for a 360 (Monday Motivator for Faculty for the Future Monday, March 2, 2015 )

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already the first week of March! I’m not sure why, but there's something particularly frantic about the middle of the spring term. When I look around, I see frazzled and exhausted faculty running from one meeting, event, and/or job talk to the next. Every conversation includes lengthy descriptions about how tired they are, how far behind they feel, and how they don't know when (or how) they will ever catch up. And, of course, there’s lots of fantasizing about Spring Break and even more about the imagined bliss of the summer.

In the midst of particularly intense times of the academic year, it's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of everyday departmental chaos and lose sight of the big picture. The problem with operating this way is that we can easily fall into old unproductive behavior patterns and short-term ways of thinking. If you’re living each day in crisis-management mode, it’s easy to forget to ask yourself if things have to be so chaotic, to seek advice from others, or to work toward creating solutions that will help you work smarter. In other words, Common Mistake New Faculty Make #8 is failing to create feedback loops you can rely on in tough times.

We all need consistent feedback (from ourselves and others) and the reality of academic life is that if you don’t proactively create feedback loops, you’re unlikely to get the type of information you need to take control of your work life, teach efficiently and well, and enjoy the job you’ve worked so long and hard to obtain. Sometimes this is referred to as a 360-degree feedback because you place yourself in the center and seek information about your performance and advice from those around you. That includes people who are above you (senior faculty) and below you (students) in your college’s organizational hierarchy. In other words, the middle of the term is a great time to ask yourself and others:

1. Am I on track?
2. What's holding me back? and
3. How can I make a positive change?

Are You on Track?
To answer this question, start by taking a look at your spring term writing goals. That’s right, go ahead and pull out that scrap of paper, post-it-note, napkin, memo pad, or whatever it was you wrote them on. The purpose of documenting your goals each term is to give you a convenient tool to evaluate your progress. Once you have them in front of you, honestly assess your productivity. If you are ahead of schedule or right on track: congratulations! If you are behind schedule, that's fine. If you haven't made any progress whatsoever, that's OK too. This is not intended to be an exercise in scholarly self-flagellation. It's simply an opportunity to honestly assess your progress without any excessive criticism, judgment, or shame.

What's Holding You Back?
If you are not satisfied with your progress, then identify what's holding you back. Personally, I'm slightly behind schedule, so I need to determine what exactly are my problems. Without identifying the problems, it's impossible to design effective solutions. I use this quick and easy format to identify what’s holding me back (it’s Julie Morgenstern’s framework that I’ve adapted for academics):

Technical Errors
The following types of errors occur when you are missing some relevant skill or technique such as:
You haven't set aside a specific time for your research and writing
You've set aside the wrong time to complete your work
You have no idea how much time a particular research, writing, teaching, or service task takes and/or you consistently underestimate the time required to complete tasks
You're the wrong person for the job (you think you have to do it all and that asking for help is a sign of weakness)
The tasks you have set out are too complex (items like "finish my book" are on your to-do list)
You can't remember what you have to do because you don't believe in lists or calendars
Your electronic or physical space is disorganized so you can never find what you need when you need it

External Constraints
These are situations or environmental factors that are beyond your control. For example:

You have an externally-imposed unrealistic workload
A health problem limits your energy
You are in a physical transition (like moving offices)
You are in a life transition (new baby, divorce, unexpected elder care)
You are externally forced to work in an interruption-rich environment
You have a disorganized person in your life who negatively impacts you (such as a chaotically driven spouse, boss, co-author, colleague, research team, client/patient/research participant)
You work in a hostile environment (and end up spending a lot of time and energy dealing with excessive conflict)

Psychological Blocks
These are the deeper issues that burst forth and keep you from moving forward every time you sit down to write:
Perfectionism
Feeling disempowered around research, writing, and/or your intellectual abilities
Fear of downtime (during which you may have to deal with difficult issues like what you really want to do with your life and/or your relational problems)
Needing to be a caretaker at the expense of your own needs (your helping others is out of balance so you feel resentful, unappreciated and overwhelmed)
Fear of failure
Fear of success
Fear of disrupting the status quo and/or speaking truth to power
Fear of completion
Unrealistically high expectations
A hyperactive inner critic, and/or
Unclear goals and priorities

How Can I Make a Positive Change?
Once you have identified what's holding you back, think of the most direct way to address these issues. You don't have to solve everything at once, but pick the greatest problem area and create a solution. For example, if you haven't written anything at all this term, it may be because you haven't set aside a specific time each day for writing or you’re leaving writing until the end of the day. That's easy to fix! Just block out 30 – 60 minutes in your calendar every morning for writing, get your butt in a chair each day at the appointed time, and start writing. Maybe you’ve discovered that you’re way behind in your classes. Figure out if the problem is that you set unrealistic goals, you’re over-preparing and then have too much content for each class period, or maybe you’re spending too much time grading. If it's the goals, then revise them. If it's over-preparation, then reduce your lecture time and increase your students' engagement. And if it’s grading, try creating a rubric for efficiency. Better yet, ask your students for feedback (via a mid-term evaluation) and then implement some of their suggestions! They will be happier and so will you. Or maybe you’ve discovered you really want to be a __________ (insert community organizer, documentary filmmaker, wedding planner, journalist, or whatever...) and you're miserable as an academic. Well, that's important information to acknowledge and work with as well. It may be time to stop running yourself ragged and start creating an exit strategy.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to consider creating feedback loops:

• Find and review your writing goals for this term.
• Without criticism or judgment, honestly assess your progress and the likelihood you will meet your goals.
• If you are on track, arrange a special treat for yourself this week -- you deserve it!
• If you are unhappy with your progress, take the time to identify what's holding you back.
• Based on your analysis, find at least one concrete way to move forward. Even if your problems are due mostly to external constraints, there are still many different strategies and techniques you can use to mitigate their negative impact.
• Consider giving a quick and easy mid-term evaluation in your classes by asking your students: 1) what do you like best about this class? 2) what do you like least about this class? and 3) what suggestions do you have for the rest of the semester? Report back in the following class and announce that you intend to implement suggestions X, Y and Z (choose the ones that reduce your preparation time and improve learning).
• Take one of your mentors out for coffee and discuss your progress, problems, and concerns about your research productivity and teaching this semester. Ask for his/her advice about how to resolve the problems you are facing. Don’t forget to thank them for taking the time to meet with you and provide you with such valuable advice (they will be more likely to assist you in the future).
• If you find yourself reactive to the idea of mid-term evaluations, gently and lovingly ask yourself WHY?
• Commit (or re-commit) yourself to writing at least 30 minutes every day.
• Express gratitude for the opportunity and privilege to do the work you do at this moment in time (even if you don't want to do it much longer).

I hope that this week brings each of you the strength to move through this busy time of the year, a spirit of gentleness as you evaluate your progress and identify your problems, and the creativity to create brilliant solutions that work for YOU.

Are You Maxed Out? (Monday Motivator for Faculty for the Future February 23, 2015)

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

I recently gave a time management workshop to a completely exhausted group of tenure-track faculty. When I asked them to tell me why they were so exhausted, I heard a lengthy list of time challenges combined with a pervasive feeling that there was no way out of their 60-80 hour workweeks. As I listened, I couldn't help but think of the old TV show "Maxed Out." Each episode featured stressed-out people who were deeply in debt and had no idea how to climb out of it. Inevitably, their financial problems boiled down to: 1) not knowing how much debt they had, 2) a lack of clarity about where their money went each month, and 3) a vague sense of what they hoped might happen in the future but no concrete plan to move in that direction. They always felt out of control and frustrated at the outset but as soon as they created a plan, took a hard look at their reality, and made some concrete behavioral changes, they experienced a sense of empowerment and forward motion. So when I was listening to the frazzled faculty it felt clear to me that they were totally maxed out -- not on money but onTIME. And because this is so common, I want to dedicate this week's Monday Motivator to common faculty error #7: Not Knowing How You Spend Your Time.

Are You Maxed Out?

We all have heard that financial intelligence requires knowing how you spend your money. The problem with time is that unlike money, it is finite. We each have 24 hours in the day and must divide that precious time between personal, physical, professional, and familial commitments. We can't borrow extra hours from a credit card or bank. Instead, we have to work with the 24 hours that we have. The faculty members in my workshop complained that they never have enough time, that they are constantly running from one commitment to the next, and that their lack of time leads to feelings of frustration, guilt, shame, and an overall sense of not moving forward at an adequate pace. But at the same time, they couldn't answer the most basic questions about how they spend their time because they just don't know where the hours go.

I have been tracking my money for the past 13 years. At first I believed it was a total waste of time because I thought that I already knew how I was spending it. But the first month I tracked every penny, I couldn't believe the discrepancy between what I thought I spent, and what I actually spent. Knowing where my money went enabled me to start gaining control over my finances and making conscious decisions that would allow me to meet my long-term goals.

Likewise, the first time I tracked my time over a week, I was shocked by how much time I was spending on service and teaching and how little I was spending on writing and research, despite knowing that my publication record was the primary criteria for promotion and tenure at my institution. Understanding how you spend your time each week (not in your imagination, but in reality) will help you to decide if you are investing in things that will pay off in the long run, or spending it on things that offer immediate gratification but no long term interest. And more importantly, you must know how you’re investing your time today in order to make conscious decisions about how you will spend it in the future.

Track Your Time
I want to suggest that you try the same homework that the adviser on Maxed Out assigned: tracking! Instead of you tracking your money, keep track of how you spend your time this week. If you are feeling exhausted, frustrated, and I-don't-even-know-how-I'm-gonna-make-it-to-Spring-Break tired, then try starting this week by simply tracking your time. It doesn't have to be difficult or unpleasant, and it doesn't require you to buy or do anything different. Just put a little scrap of paper on your desk and keep a running tab of your activities and the time you spend on them during each day this week. Include everything: e-mail, writing, course prep, grading, talking to colleagues, reading, meetings, phone calls, student meetings, attending talks, preparing to give a talk, worrying, crying, food breaks, Facebook, etc. If you want to use an app, try Rescue Time.

Evaluate Your Data
Once you have a week's worth of data, tally up how much time you spend on research, teaching and service when you sit down for your weekly planning meeting (aka theSunday Meeting). That's a great time to gently and patiently ask yourself:
Is how I’m spending my time aligned with how I will be evaluated for tenure and promotion?
Does my time reflect my personal values, priorities, and long-term goals?

If the answer to these questions is "yes," then congratulations! But if you find that the answer is a resounding "NO!" then it's time to make some changes. For example, if 50 percent of your evaluation criteria is based on research and publication and you are only spending 2 hours a week writing -- there's a problem. If teaching is 25 percent of your evaluation criteria, but you are spending 40 hours a week on it -- there's a problem. And if service is taking up more than a few hours per week -- there's definitely a problem. The good news is that these are problems that can be resolved by proactively adjusting your behavior.

Rethink Your Time Expenditures
Faculty development researchers have documented that the difference between successful new faculty and those who struggle is how they spend their time. Successful new faculty:
Spend at least 30 minutes a day on scholarly writing
Integrate their research into their teaching
Manage course preparation time and avoid over-preparing for classes
Spend time each week discussing research and teaching with colleagues

Only you can determine if you’re satisfied with how you are spending your time each day. But, if you’re unhappy, exhausted, and feel like you’re not moving forward, then becoming conscious of how your time is spent AND comparing it to the behaviors of successful new faculty should give you some concrete ideas about how to climb out of your time debt.

The Weekly Challenge
If you're feeling maxed out this week, I challenge you to:

• Track your time!
• Without criticism or judgment, honestly evaluate how your time expenditures compare with your tenure and promotion criteria and/or your personal goals and values.
• Try to identify and eliminate unnecessary time demands to increase the time you have available for the things that really matter.
• Write at least 30 minutes every day.

I hope that this week brings each of you the patience to track your time, the wisdom to evaluate your current situation, and the sense of empowerment that results from making conscious decisions about how you spend your time each day.

Hedge Your Bets (Monday Motivator for Faculty for the Future)

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

Last week's Monday Motivator ("Get Out There and Shake It!") definitely pressed some people’s "personal responsibility" buttons! I heard lots of immediate reactivity, but I also heard from people who decided to take new steps forward by setting up lunch dates, asking someone to read a manuscript, focusing their regular conversation with a colleague on research (instead of departmental gossip), and one person simply decided to approach one of her crankiest colleague in a whole new spirit. Bravo!

The fact of the matter is that most departments aren’t set up to support your success and yet, YOU HAVE TO SUCCEED ANYWAY! So, congratulations to all of you who acknowledged that as your reality and stepped out in a new way last week. And since I'm on the general topic ofShaking It, let's move on to the next common mistake new faculty members make: Putting All Your Eggs in One Institutional Basket.

I realize that it's incredibly difficult to get a tenure-track job these days and some of us were in graduate school for so long that we feel extraordinarily grateful to our institutions for simply employing us. In addition, many of us were trained under faculty mentors who spent their entire careers at ONE institution and taught us this was "the way things are" in academic life. Regrettably, the result is that some new faculty members behave as if their very life depends on that tenure decision. They bend over backwards to please everyone at their institution, invest large amounts of time in long term institutional projects, and accept poor treatment out of a desperate hope that they will be deemed worthy and allowed to stay. In other words, their identity and self-worth are so wholly dependent on winning tenure at their current institution that failing to do so would be utterly unbearable.

The problem with this approach is twofold. First and foremost, you don't know whether your current institution is going to make a long-term commitment to you (via tenure and promotion), so why invest 100 percent of your emotional energy, identity, and self in that outcome? More importantly, this desperate stance puts you in a powerless position because you are, in effect, handing all the power over your future to your employer (instead of assuming some control over it yourself).

How your senior colleagues will vote on your tenure case is out of your control, but there are several important factors that are fully under your control: 1) your research productivity, 2) your emotional investment in your current institution, and 3) promoting your work beyond your institution. Below I outline just a few concrete ways that you can protect yourself from the possibility of future loss, by identifying your power today and using it to invest in your productivity first.

Cultivate a Professional Attitude
One of the best ways that you can hedge your bets is to shift your reference group from the faculty at your institution to the broader national arena of your discipline. By understanding yourself as "a scholar who currently works at ______ college/university," you will begin to understand the necessity of not only "shaking it" with your departmental colleagues, but extending your network to get out there and shake it with the other scholars in your discipline. By proactively extending your network and maximizing your research productivity, you increase the possibility that you will be marketable in your later tenure-track years and then have the ability to decide whether or not you want to stay at your institution (as opposed to whether or not others will allow you to stay).

Make a Top 10 List
The best advice I received as new faculty member was to make a list of the top 10 people in my research area and then make it my business to connect with them during my five years on the tenure track. Developing your Top 10 list is critical for two reasons: 1) this is the most likely pool of scholars from which your external review letters will be requested when you come up for tenure review, and 2) these are the scholars that your work is in conversation with (a conversation that can't happen if they are unaware of your published work). Even if you are at a college where teaching and research are equally valued, your institution will still solicit external reviews of your scholarship and they are likely to be drawn from the pool of well-known researchers in your area.

Extend Yourself
Once you have identified your Top 10, figure out how to connect with these individuals. You could invite them to give a talk at your institution, approach them at conferences, send them your recently published article with a personal note, etc. Some will be pleasant and approachable, and others will completely ignore you. What's important is that you begin proactively connecting with people in your discipline who matter to your future success -- as a candidate for tenure and as a scholar. Additionally, feel free to do whatever you think will help introduce other scholars in your field to your work, such as giving talks at your friend's institutions and other local colleges, giving great presentations at conferences, and letting other people know when you have published something they might find useful. The point is to let as many people know about your research as possible, while making targeted efforts with those who are likely to be asked to write your external reviews.

If You Are Unhappy, Go on the Market
Nothing puts your current situation in perspective like dipping a toe in the water! If you have published prolifically in the first few years of your current tenure-track job, then you are a far more attractive job candidate then you were ABD, and you are likely to generate more interest than in your previous job search. Sometimes visiting another campus makes you value your current institution in a whole new way, and other times it can make you wonder why on earth you have worked there so long. Either way, it can be a valuable experience to help you make the mental shift from institutional dependency to independence as a scholar.

Write Everyday
I should have started with this item, because everything else I've said is predicated upon your ability to publish your research. Publications are the currency in the academic market so maintaining research productivity will fulfill you as a scholar, increase your marketability, give you some measure of power over your own future, and provide you with the opportunity to make choices. In short, be sure you are writing every day and doing what you need to do to publish your research.

The Weekly Challenge
Write every day for at least 30 minutes.
Try creating your Top 10 list (if you don't have one already).
Brainstorm ways you could connect with the people on your Top 10 list.
Consider what it would mean to think of yourself FIRST as a scholar, and SECOND as a "junior" faculty member at your particular institution.
If you feel reactive to imagining yourself beyond your institutional walls, gently and patiently ask yourself WHY?
If you find yourself feeling "disloyal” by this type of thinking, remind yourself that your institution will quickly and easily cut you loose if you are denied tenure. Then consider how you could adjust your emotional investment in your institution to MATCH their investment in you.

Life on the tenure track can frequently leave new faculty feeling powerless, vulnerable, and at the mercy of subjective criteria for evaluation. I hope that this week brings each of you to clarity to claim what power you have in your academic career, the imagination to see beyond your immediate campus, and the peace that comes from knowing your future is in your hands.

[Acrobat SDK Plug-in Development] How to extract all the terms from the PDF document and create an index (COS Dictionary)

This code snippet will explain how to extract all the terms from a PDF document and then create a COS dictionary (similar to Java HashMap). You can use this method to collect all the terms and their offset value and use these offset of each term for other purposes such as highlighting terms.

I assume that you've already know how to implement basic plug-in functionality using Acrobat SDK. The version of the SDK used in this code example is Acrobat XI SDK. I also assume following requirements,

• Read PDF 32000-1:2008  for further information
  wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
• Offset of a term is the index inside the PDF document. As an example, first term of the PDF document starts with 0, and next 1 so on. 

ACCB1 void ACCB2 termExtractor()
{
 // try to get front PDF document 
 AVDoc avDoc = AVAppGetActiveDoc();

 //Display words of the pdf file. 
 PDDoc currentPDDoc =AVDocGetPDDoc(avDoc);
 AVPageView currentPageView = AVDocGetPageView (avDoc);
 ASInt32 pageNum = AVPageViewGetPageNum(currentPageView);

 //Create a PDWordFinderConfigRec object;
 PDWordFinderConfigRec pConfig;
 
 //Set the DWordFinderConfigRec object's attributes
 memset(&pConfig, 0, sizeof(PDWordFinderConfigRec));
 pConfig.recSize = sizeof(PDWordFinderConfigRec);
 pConfig.ignoreCharGaps = true;
 pConfig.ignoreLineGaps = true;
 pConfig.noAnnots = true;
 pConfig.noEncodingGuess = true;

 //Create a PDWordFinder object
 PDWordFinder pdWordFinder = PDDocCreateWordFinderEx(currentPDDoc, WF_LATEST_VERSION, false, &pConfig);

 // Acquire all the terms inside the PDF page. 
 ASInt32 numWords;
 PDWord wordInfo;
 PDWord *pXYSortTable;
 PDWordFinderAcquireWordList(pdWordFinder, pageNum,&wordInfo, &pXYSortTable, NULL, &nWords);

 // Create COS Dictionary to keep track of all the words and their offset. 
 CosDoc cd;
 CosObj Dict;
 cd = PDDocGetCosDoc(currentPDDoc);
 Dict = CosNewDict(cd,false,nWords); 
 PDWord pdNWord = PDWordFinderGetNthWord(pdWordFinder, nWordCounter );
        for(int nWordCounter = 0; nWordCounter < nWords; nWordCounter++)
        {
  // Get the word as a string
  char stringBuffer[125];
  PDWordGetString (pdNWord, stringBuffer, sizeof(stringBuffer));
  pdfCorpus << stringBuffer;
  
  // Add each term into COS Dictionary to use it later with highlighting method
  // Offset is the location of each term in the document. First term offset is 0 and next term is 1 etc. 
  bool keyExist = CosDictKnown(Dict,ASAtomFromString(stringBuffer));
  if( keyExist == true) // To-do: Duplicate term
  {
   // To-do: catch duplilcates
  }
  else // new term
  {
   CosDictPut(Dict,ASAtomFromString(stringBuffer), CosNewInteger(cd,false,nWordCounter)); 
  }
 } 

[Acrobat SDK Plug-in Development] How to create Text Highlight

Instead of the below method, if you want to know how to extract text directly using the Acrobat Text Highlight tool, please read my new blog entry: How to extract text from Acrobat Text Highlight Tool?

This code snippet will explain how to create text highlight plug-in using Acrobat SDK. I assume that you've already know how to implement basic plug-in functionality using Acrobat SDK. The version of the SDK used in this code example is Acrobat XI SDK. I also assume following requirements,

• Read PDF 32000-1:2008 12.5.6.10, “Text Markup Annotations”, for further information
  wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
• There already exist a COS Dictionary with all the terms in the PDF document. COS dictionary is similar to a Java HashMap. It stores <Key,Value> pairs and in this case <term,offset> values.
• Offset of a term is the index inside the PDF document. As an example, first term of the PDF document starts with 0, and next 1 so on. 
• You can use PDWordFinderAcquireWordList() method to get the total word list and then use a loop to create the CosObj Dic. Read my previous post about how to extract terms from PDF and create COS Dictionary. 

void highlightText()
{  
 // There is a term "explosive" in the Cos Dictionary Dict  and get its offset
 CosObj offset = CosDictGet(Dict,ASAtomFromString("explosive"));
 //Create Highlight HliteEntry object to keep track of the offset (start index)
 //and the length which is how many terms to highlight. 
 HiliteEntry hilite;
 hilite.offset = CosIntegerValue(offset); 
 hilite.length = 1;

 AVDoc currentAVDoc = AVAppGetActiveDoc();
 PDDoc currentPDDoc = AVDocGetPDDoc(currentAVDoc);
 AVPageView currentPageView = AVDocGetPageView(currentAVDoc); 
 ASInt32 pageNum = AVPageViewGetPageNum(currentPageView);
  
 PDEElement pdeElement;
 ASFixedRect boundingRect; // bounding rectangle of the term
 PDPage pdPage = PDDocAcquirePage (currentPDDoc, pageNum);
 PDAnnot pdAnnot;
 
 // Set the color you want to highlight your text
 PDColorValueRec red;
 red.space = PDDeviceRGB;
 red.value[0] = ASInt32ToFixed(1); 
 red.value[1] = 0; 
 red.value[2] = 0; 

 // highlight 
 AVPageViewSetColor(currentPageView, &red); 
 PDTextSelect textSelection = PDTextSelectCreateWordHilite(pdPage,&hilite, 1);

 AVDocSetSelection(currentAVDoc, ASAtomFromString("Text"),(void *)textSelection, true);
 AVPageViewDrawNow(currentPageView);
 AVDocShowSelection (currentAVDoc);
 
 // make text selection and get the bounding rectangle of the selection. 
 PDTextSelect selectedText = static_cast(AVDocGetSelection(currentAVDoc));
 PDTextSelectGetBoundingRect(selectedText,&boundingRect);
  
 // use the bounding rectangle to create a highlight annotation QuadPoints
 // and bounding rectangle Cos objects. We need these 2 to create highlight type. 
 CosObj ArrayObj, RecObj;
 CosDoc cd = PDDocGetCosDoc(currentPDDoc);
 CosObj cosPage = PDPageGetCosObj(pdPage); 
 
 ArrayObj = CosNewArray(cd,false,8);
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,0,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.right));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,1,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.bottom));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,2,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.left));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,3,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.bottom));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,4,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.right));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,5,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.top));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,6,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.left));
 CosArrayPut(ArrayObj,7,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.top));
 
 // Now create bounding rectangle points
 RecObj = CosNewArray(cd,false,4);
 CosArrayPut(RecObj,0,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.left));
 CosArrayPut(RecObj,1,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.right));
 CosArrayPut(RecObj,2,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.bottom));
 CosArrayPut(RecObj,3,CosNewFixed(cd,false, boundingRect.top));



// These are the properties to set in order to create a text highlight
// PDF 32000-1:2008 12.5.6.10, “Text Markup Annotations”, Table 164 and Table 179
 CosObj cosDict = CosNewDict(cd, true, 4);
 CosDictPutKeyString(cosDict, "Subtype", CosNewNameFromString(cd, false, "Highlight"));
 CosDictPutKeyString(cosDict, "QuadPoints",ArrayObj);
 CosDictPutKeyString(cosDict, "Rect", RecObj);
 
 pdAnnot = PDAnnotFromCosObj(cosDict);
 PDPageAddAnnot(pdPage,-2,pdAnnot);
 PDPageNotifyContentsDidChange(pdPage);
 PDAnnotSetColor(pdAnnot, &red);
 AVPageViewDrawNow (currentPageView);
 PDPageRelease (pdPage); 
} 

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Microsoft SMS&P Partner Community Blog - By Eric Ligman

PhD Qualifiers - Oct. 11th

Getting ready for my PhD qualifiers, and only a week before the judgment day. Am I depressed already?

My reading list is not bad compared to others like my friend Josh who got 2 entire books (Architecture and Algorithms) a 38 page research paper and another 8 pager. My case, I got only 4 papers each with 14,8,12 and 12 pages each. Feels like my list is too light, may be I should plan reading few more from the respective reference lists.

Fingers crossed, hope I should be OK.

Reading #30: Tahuti: A Geometrical Sketch Recognition System for UML Class Diagrams

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Jonathan 

SUMMARY

              Tahuti, a multi-stroke sketch recognition environment for class diagrams in UML where users can sketch the diagrams on a tablet or white- board in the same way they would on paper and the sketches are interpreted by the computer. Proposed system differs from graffiti-based approaches to this task in that it allows users to drawn an object as they would with pen and paper. The system recognizes objects based on their geometrical properties by examining the line segments’ angles, slopes, and other properties, rather than requiring the user to draw the objects in a pre-defined manner. Recognizing the objects by their geometrical properties gives users the freedom to sketch and edit diagrams as they would naturally, while maintaining a high level of recognition accuracy. Proposed system uses a multi-layer framework for sketch recognition. The multi-layer framework allows the system to recognize multi-stroke objects by their geometrical properties. The stages of the multi-layer recognition framework are: 1) Preprocessing 2) Selection 3) Recognition 4) Identification. After each stroke is drawn, rudimentary processing is performed on the stroke, reducing the stroke to an ellipse or a series of line and curve segments. A collection of spatially and temporally close strokes is chosen, and the line segments contained in the collection of strokes are then recognized as either an editing command or a viewable object.

            During the recognition stage, all stroke collections are examined to see if a particular stroke collection could be interpreted as a viewable object or an editing command. During the identification stage, a final interpretation is chosen, and a collection of strokes is identified as a viewable object or an editing command. All possible interpretations found in the recognition stage from the stroke collections are presented to the identification stage. The identification stage selects the final interpretation based on the following rules. 

DISCUSSION

            Tahuti combines the sketching freedom provided by paper sketches and the processing power available in an interpreted diagram. The system is based on a multi-layer recognition framework and recognizes objects by their geometrical properties, rather than requiring that the user draw the objects in a pre-defined manner. This system considers only groups of strokes that fall within a spatial bound. This spatial bound on its own may not be enough, especially for regions that contain many overlapping strokes. For example, if there are ten lines that all fall within a small region, to identify an arrow, the system still may have to try combinations of these lines.

Reading #29: Scratch Input Creating Large, Inexpensive, Unpowered and Mobile Finger Input Surfaces

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

           Jonathan 

SUMMARY

              In this paper, the authors provide a new input technique that allows small devices to appropriate existing, large, passive surfaces such as desks and walls, for use as a kind of input device. This Scratch Input technique operates by listening to the sound of “scratching” (e.g., with a fingernail) that is transmitted through the surface material. This signal can be used to recognize a vocabulary of gestures carried out by the user. The proposed sensor is simple and inexpensive, and can be easily incorporated into mobile devices, enabling them to appropriate whatever solid surface they happen to be resting on. Alternately, it can be very easily deployed, for example, to make existing walls or furniture input-capable.

            To capture sound transmission through solid materials, authors proposed to use a modified stethoscope. This is particularly well suited to both amplifying sound and detecting high frequency noises. This is attached to a generic microphone, which converts the sound into an electrical signal. In this particular implementation, the signal is amplified and connected to a computer through the audio-input jack. Scratch Input’s non-spatial property gives it a significantly different character from many other surface input techniques and does preclude some uses. Results indicate participants were able to achieve an average accuracy of 89.5%. As hypothesized, accuracy suffered as gesture complexity grew. Gestures with two of fewer motions achieved accuracies in excess of 90%. 

DISCUSSION

            The Scratch Input, an acoustic-based finger input technique that can be used to create large, inexpensive and mobile finger input surfaces. This can allow mobile devices to appropriate surfaces on which they rest for gestural input. This revealed that Scratch Input is both easy to use and accurate on a variety of surfaces. Foremost, most mechanical sensors are engineered to provide relatively flat response curves over the range of frequencies that is relevant to signal. This is a desirable property for most applications where a faithful representation of an input signal – uncolored by the properties of the transducer – is desired. However, because only a specific set of frequencies is conducted through the arm in response to tap input, a flat response curve leads to the capture of irrelevant frequencies and thus to a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Reading #27: K-sketch: A 'Kinetic' Sketch Pad for Novice Animators

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Francisco

SUMMARY

              The authors proposed an informal, 2D animation system called KSketch, the “Kinetic” Sketch Pad. K-Sketch is a pen-based system that relies on users’ intuitive sense of space and time while still supporting a wide range of uses. K-Sketch animations are often rough, but they are still useful in informal situations and as prototypes of formal animations. The goal of this project has not been to design novel interaction techniques but rather to focus on high-level choices about tool features. Thus, the authors conducted field studies to find out how an informal animation tool might be used and whether or not it could be made general-purpose.

From these interviews with nineteen animators and would be animators, authors compiled a library of 72 usage scenarios for an animation system. these results in more detail and describe a novel optimization technique that enable to make K-Sketch’s interface simultaneously fast, simple, and powerful.

            Process begins by reviewing interviews with animators and with non-animators. This is followed by an analysis of the library of usage scenarios collected and a description of interface optimization technique. Since many novice animators wish to do what experienced animators do, the authors began field studies by interviewing eight experienced animators to see how an informal tool would fit in their work process. K-Sketch currently supports all ten desired animation operations: Translate, Scale, Rotate, Set Timing, Move Relative, Appear, Disappear, Trace, Copy Motion, and Orient to Path. 

DISCUSSION

            These results show that K-Sketch’s simple interface has strong benefits. The simplicity of K-Sketch’s interface also meant less practice time was needed before tasks could be performed. These tools allow designers to build prototypes or storyboards of dynamic systems by creating sketches according to conventional visual languages.

Reading #26: Picturephone: A Game for Sketch Data Capture

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Francisco 

SUMMARY

             This paper proposes a multi-player sketching game called Picturephone. Its purpose is to capture hand-drawn sketches and player-provided descriptions which can be used by other researchers to develop or test sketch recognition systems. Picturephone is not a new recognition system—it is a tool for capturing hand-made drawings in many domains by many people, along with human-classified descriptions. Picturephone is inspired by the children’s game called Telephone. In Telephone, a player privately describes something to the person to the left. That person then conveys the message to the person to their left, and so on. Over time the message may change drastically. Picturephone uses a web oriented client/server architecture and is known to run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux. Both client and server are written in Java. Communication is done with the standard HTTP protocol using the host web browser’s network connection, allowing the game to work unimpeded by firewall or router restrictions.

            There are three primary game modes: draw, describe, and rate. Players are randomly assigned one of these modes. In Draw mode (Figure 2), players are given a text description and are asked to draw it using the sketching surface at the right. A time limit is enforced to encourage simplicity. 

DISCUSSION

            Picturephone is the first instance of a class of planned sketching games that could provide researchers with a method to acquire data about drawings. This includes the physical act of sketching as well as how people describe those drawn elements. The paper is lack of most of its implementation details, and significantly overlaps with the paper described in Reading #24. Here it asks the player to draw using the description “three concentric circles”. After completing the drawing, the player hits ‘Done’. The game chooses among your preferred modes: sketching, describing, or rating.

The user gets a few ‘rate’ phases in a row here. It simply asks the player to rate how closely the two pictures match. The picture on the left was the basis for a description, and the one on the right was a sketch made based on that description. When a player rates these two drawings, points are assigned to the people who made both sketches as well as whoever made the mediating description. As you can see, the task of rating is rather subjective, but since it collects lots of ratings for the same pair it seems to work out fairly well. Eventually the game picks ‘describe’ mode, so here you see the player typing in a description about a floor plan layout of a square house with a bathroom and kitchen in the corners. This process continues until the player chooses to end their session.

Reading #25: A Descriptor for Large Scale Image Retrieval Based on Sketched Feature Lines

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Jonathan

SUMMARY

              The main contribution of this work is a sketch-based query system for image databases containing millions of images. As most current retrieval algorithms for large image databases it is based on a small descriptor that captures essential properties of the images. A main feature is that it elegantly addresses the asymmetry between the binary user sketch on the one hand and the full color image on the other hand. The proposed descriptor is constructed in such a way that both the full color image and the sketch undergo exactly the same preprocessing steps to compute the descriptor. The resulting sketch based image retrieval system can be used by any novice user to quickly query the image database. The power of the system stems from exploiting the vast amount of existing images, which offsets obvious deficits in image descriptors and search.

The authors state that the descriptor’s performance is superior to a variant of the MPEG-7 edge histogram descriptor in a quantitative evaluation for which measured retrieval ranks of 27 sketches created from reference images out of the image database. 

DISCUSSION

            I’m totally perplexed. Is this related to sketch recognition? 

Reading #24: Games for Sketch Data Collection

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Hong-Hoe (Ayden) Kim

SUMMARY

              This paper presents a multi-player sketching games to capture a data corpus of hand-drawn sketches and player-provided descriptions from many users on a wide range of subjects. Two systems with distinct game mechanics are described: Picturephone and Stellasketch. Picturephone has three primary game modes: draw, describe, and rate. Players are randomly assigned one of these modes. Stellasketch is a synchronous, multi-player sketching game similar to the parlor game Pictionary. One player is asked to make a drawing based on a secret clue. The other players see the drawing unfold as it is made and privately label the drawing. While Picturephone’s descriptions are meant to be used to recreate a drawing, Stellasketch’s labels simply state what the sketch depicts. Labels are timestamped, so they can be associated with sketches at various stages of completion.

The characteristics of the two games’ data differ. While Picturephone’s sketches are complete at the time when others describe them, a Stellasketch drawing is labeled as it is made. Furthermore, Picturephone descriptions are generally longer and in approximately complete sentences, but Stellasketch labels are often short noun-phrases. Because a Stellasketch drawing is labeled as it is made, players usually furnish multiple interpretations, and there is often significant agreement among players. Agreement indicates those interpretations are more ‘correct’. Sometimes labels cluster into more than one group. While Picturephone supports people to play at their own rate, a game of Stellasketch requires several people to play at the same rate. 

DISCUSSION

            This paper has presented Picturephone and Stellasketch, two sketching games for collecting data about how people make and describe hand-made drawings.